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On
Balance By
Jay Ray Thanks
to Sigmund Freud, we have been taught for decades that sex is the greatest urge
motivating us. There is no doubt the need for survival is a huge factor running
throughout our Psyche, and sex along with money meets that need in different
ways. A deep urge that overrules these two however, in all species, is the urge
towards growth and balance. An experiment was done years ago with two control
groups of elephants. The purpose was to assess what the most affective means of
dealing with tree loss would be. One group were culled from helicopters as they
had been up until this point. The other group were not culled, but were in fact
left to grow at the rate that Nature decreed. This experiment was run over
several years. The question was what would happen if the elephants were allowed
to breed without human intervention. Many said that they would devastate the
bush to extinction. In
actual fact, there was a severe
depletion of vegetation. So much so, that the elephants were unable to sustain
their rate of growth. Also as a result of the depletion, the rainfall in that
area was affected and a local draught was the outcome. This caused huge numbers
of elephants to die from lack of food and water. Meanwhile, the culling of the
other control group continued and at this stage it really did appear that they
were the outright winners. The vegetation suffered much less depletion in that
area. Nevertheless, as the elephants in the uncontrolled group reached dire
proportions of devastation, the vegetation began to recover. There was a good
deal of fertilization that occurred from the dead bodies, and the trees
themselves did not have to compete for sunlight due to the lack of bush and thus
grew quickly. By the end of the experiment, the uncontrolled area, despite its
depletion, had recovered and overtaken the reforestation pace of the culling
zone. Quite a surprise for the people conducting the inquiry. Balance
and growth, you see, go together. They move forward together, creating
evolution. Balance tempers growth in certain areas to give all things the
opportunity to reach potential. Where that potential is threatened, balance
addresses this for the good of the big picture. Within
each of us there is the urge for growth and balance. But for each of us those
things are different. Like water, we all have to find our own ‘level’ at our
own rate. This historically has been a hard concept for humans to grasp. Other
species have not had to grasp it. They have accepted it. We, however, have the job
of coming to understand it as well as accepting it, and like teenage children, we
seem to rebel against it. Until, that is, we prove it for ourselves, sometimes
with dire consequences. Where
growth is inhibited, we find the urge to address that by bursts of acceleration,
until balance is reached again. On the other hand, where growth has been overly
promoted, we can expect an ‘adjustment’ backwards, like the stock market. This
principle can be applied to everything. All we have to do to predict what is
going to happen next is to look at what has been happening to date. The
environment, for instance, has been severely “overgrazed”. We can expect
dieback of the human population that is causing that. It can happen by nature taking charge with disease, flood or
famine. Or we can self regulate. George Bush is attempting to do that, probably
unwittingly, through war. Maybe a better option would be to do so through choice
not to overpopulate, eat less or consume less in general, as much as our
consumer directed Society encourages us, like delinquent teenagers, to do the
opposite. Another
area that is obviously affected in this way, is the inequality between men and
women, white and coloured races, so called civilized society verses indigenous
cultures. To the degree to which we have been dependant, we are going to have to
learn independence and how to support ourselves. Where we have presumed to
‘caretake’ others, we are going to need to pull back and deal to our own
lives and needs. Cultures that have derided other cultures ways of being will
discover a need to look to and improve the workings of their own Social mores.
Wherever there has been imbalance, we can expect a correction. We either do that
willing through appropriate choices, or Balance will do it for us less
comfortably. The implications are reasonable obvious. Within our own personal
lives we need to seek out the beliefs that create imbalance. Beliefs that
inhibit appropriate potential growth of both ourselves and others. Once we have
found them we need to willing address them through choice to offset the
necessity for Balance to do it for us through some form of ‘crisis of
adjustment’. This is our life’s work. We do not exist in isolation. All that
we do either works to bring balance or destroy it. But for every action there is
a counterbalancing reaction. A peristalsis of energy, moving us ever forward. |